This invention relates to social networks and in particular to the community translation of user-generated content over a social networking system.
Social networks, or social utilities that track and enable connections between users (including people, businesses, and other entities), have become prevalent in recent years. In particular, a social networking system allows users to communicate information more efficiently. For example, a user may post contact information, background information, job information, hobbies, and/or other user-specific data to a location associated with the user on a social networking system. Other users can then review the posted data by browsing user profiles or searching for profiles including specific data. A social networking system also allows users to associate themselves with other users, thus creating a web of connections among the users of the social networking system. These connections among the users can be used by the social networking system to offer more relevant information to each user in view of the users' own stated interests.
Various users of a social networking system may be competent in different languages (e.g., French, English). As a result, a user may not be able to understand information posted by another user if that posted information is not in a language known by the user. Such language barriers may reduce the range of useful connections that a user may make with other users. Also, a user may not be able to understand text provided by the social networking system itself if the language of that text is not known to the user. This text may include instructions, menu items, and button labels (e.g., “Click to submit”) provided by the social networking system.
At present, operators of social networking systems manually translate text into various desired languages. However, performing such translations require great effort and expense on the part of the system operators. As a result, much content currently available on social networking systems are not translated. As such, many users of social networking systems who need translations are not able to properly use the social networking systems and/or are not able to communicate with users who use different languages.